New Delhi, June 9 -- A well-worn, even if possibly apocryphal, anecdote from Wall Street is that during a prolonged bear market in the 1960s, a horde of disgruntled investors landed at the office of a famous stockbroker. What riled them was not the deep red shade of their portfolios, which after all was expected during a downturn, but the underperformance of their non-cyclical or defensive stocks. These stocks, belonging to sectors like utilities, consumer staples and healthcare, were sold with the express promise of providing stability during periods of market turbulence.

The stockbroker had advised many of his clients to allocate as much as half of their corpus to such defensive scrips.

When confronted with the disappointing performan...